Actually most CS PhD's out there don't do too heavy theoretical work. They do, however, write more proof-of-concept level programs and systems, than actually producing engineering quality programs.

Try to pick up a paper in non-theoretical journals or conference proceedings you'll see most of them describing a new concept or application of theory, and then its implementation. A lot PhD students come up with the concepts and write the code, which are sometimes referred to as "experiments". Many projects are even about making the programs themselves.

On the other hand, I agree a lot of theoreticians don't like to code, but a lot of them were also once quite good at it. They maybe did so much coding since before school that they began to hate it, or simply have little interest in pure engineering. Then you'll find some who still retain an interest in coding, and I think they are quite easy to spot.

Except you can now compare Kobo not with Amazon, but the e-book department of Amazon.

I didn't really buy into the CEO's comments because I believe Amazon would have had an e-book team larger than their entire company. But I didn't think his conclusions must be wrong, because indeed the Amazon would adjust its e-book related operations to serve the enterprise's other interests.

Now that I know Rakuten owns it, it's a different story.

Indeed. In "A Brief History of Time", he says he likes to make bets against his own theories, as a kind of insurance for when they go wrong. He'd definitely like to bet against what he would like to believe.

I would worry about some other things when a powerful politician, who can deal with policies about businesses, also runs a successful business.

You'll need to look at the economic value of mining, and also compare the numbers to the cost of the infrastructure those of current currency/payment systems. I have no substantial information on both, but let's not pretend cash and credit cards are cheap to maintain...

Not that I think Hawking contributed that much to his field, but I think even being in the top 100 alive makes it into the list of "one of the greatest". After all, there are dozens of physics Nobel laureates still alive, a lot of them haven't even retired yet...

Not really.. using touch to me has been a compromise, usually made in exchange for the nice form factor of a tablet. If ASUS touchpads weren't so bad I would have used my Transformer without touching the screen. I am still quite a lot more accurate and swift using the keyboard and the mouse, and touch screen interfaces are has really not been optimal for doing real work.

Learn to separate the following three things: 1) What the CEO says 2) What the accounting department shows you 3) How people in the company actually do stuff

With all the hard work beating Donkey Kong she'll find herself ending up with a short fatty with a funny moustache that dresses like a pervert...

Correction:

median household income per day

$125 is close to the median household income in the US. In other words, it's enough to sustain an average family for one day, covering taxes, food, mortgage, petrol, other non-essential stuff, and then some change to the bank. All for a silly number (more precisely a record over an international database) that won't take much more than a phone call, and in some cases just by clicking a few buttons online - it probably doesn't even directly cost them cash, as many governments use tax money to help sustain the system.

Then it's not the only cost to publish a book. You'd probably need to pay up front for marketing, distribution; other middle-men such as retail would at least take a cut from the final sales. It's like a store taking $1 per day just for the privilege to let a book to sit on a shelf in an obscure position. Looks cheap but it makes many paper-back books less than worthless to the author in a few days. If an author pays $125 for such triviality like an ISBN and it's "cheap", then I guess bankruptcy is also cheap. So it's got to be expensive.

The only way they could charge even $25 per number is because they have some kind of absolute power of granting ISBNs, and take advantage of the information asymmetry against "naive authors". The ridiculous $125 price tag, on the other hand, is probably more of a way to make $25 look cheap, as a common marketing technique.

To be fair, in a different way it made Alsup a better judge than some others. I guess that's what GP is talking about.

Postdoc - postdoctoral research. It's right after a PhD, not just college. It's also meant to be a temporary job.

Particles at "negative" temperature like to give up energy. Then there's this explanation: "Temperature measures the willingness of an object to give up energy". This is contradictory.

I think most of the confusion is caused by this horribly nonsensical naming

Before ever considering other technological issues, you still need to ask the same questions for that robot.